Re^2: thoughts on perl language

[Jenda]

Beg your pardon? English jam-packed with irregular verbs? With what language did you compare it??? Some 370 irregular verbs with three forms to a verb?

English has a messed up spelling due to its history, other than that it's brain-dead regular.

[tobyink]

I'm not entirely sure where you get the number 370 from. This website claims to have a list of 620 available to its subscribers, and I imagine that even that it not exhaustive.

It's not about sheer numbers though. Most verbs are regular, obviously. However many of the irregular verbs also happen to be very commonly used. Take a look at this list. It's the 10 most common verbs in the English language:

1. be
2. have
3. do
4. say
5. get
6. make
7. go
8. know
9. take
10. see

How many are irregular? How about all of them! Only 7 of the top 25 English verbs are regular.

Compare that to, say, German, which happens to be one of English's closest neighbours linguistically. In German there's only one truly irregular verb, sein (to be). Other than that, all verbs fall into two categories, strong and weak, which each have their own (different, but predictable) conjugation rules. Of the top ten German verbs, one is irregular, eight are strong, and one is weak.

Three forms to a verb? Regular ones have four (look, looks, looking, looked). Irregular ones have X forms, where X is a number perhaps less, perhaps more, or perhaps equal to four.

There are plenty of weird things in English other than spelling. How about...

• The verb "to dust" can mean to add dust to a surface, but also to remove dust from a surface.

• Irregular plurals: mouse/mice, goose/geese, man/men, etc. The plural form of "sheep" is "sheep".

• For that matter, why on earth is there no singular for the word "cattle". They're a common enough animal, and it clearly makes sense to be able to talk about them in the singular. So why do we just have this plural word "cattle"?

  There is of course "cow", but that refers exclusively to females. "Bull" refers to males, and "calf" (another irregular plural by the way, calves) to the young. There is no English word to refer to a single individual Bos primigenius without committing to its sex or age.

• Given the two phrases "a cute little puppy" versus "a little cute puppy"; almost all native English speakers would agree that the second one sounds wrong. Virtually none of them could tell you why. :-)

  Similarly, "a nice warm bath"/"a warm nice bath"; "a red Japanese car"/"a Japanese red car"; "an old woollen scarf"/"a woollen old scarf". In each case the first is right, the second is wrong.

• Bags of synonyms. If you know what the word "moon" means, that doesn't help you if you hear the phrase "lunar cycles".

  The main reason we have so many synonyms in English is that the language is a cut and shut combination of Low German and Norse French. So we ended up with one word inherited from German ("need") and one from French ("require") meaning exactly the same thing. We also ended up with a lot of (mostly technical) words derived directly from Latin without the French intermediary, and then to make matters worse the bloody Vikings gave us a whole bunch of other words we neither needed nor required.

  (This also explains why nobody wins the human race. English has two words spelt "race" which are pronounced exactly the same. "Race" meaning ethnicity or population comes from French; "race" meaning a speed contest comes from Norse.)

• And I don't want to bang on about them but... the idioms. Perhaps you and I don't see eye to eye on this, but as far as deciphering the meaning of a sentence goes, even if you know the definitions of the individual words, it's not a done deal.

  On the other hand, perhaps I can see your point? After all, people learning English as a second language do seem to pick up the meaning of idioms as soon as they run into them. Maybe it's a piece of cake?!

[Jenda]

It's mostly the common verbs that are irregular ... they are being used often and thus have a chance to become and stay irregular.

OK. So maybe there's more commonly used irregular verbs than in one specific language, what about the rest? Let's have a quick look at Czech. An ordinary verb has 6 forms just for the present (1st-3rd person x singular/plural). For conjugation verbs are separated into five groups, with 16 different patterns in total and we haven't yet leave the realm of verbs that could have been somehow fitted into a group. See the intro for yourself here.

Nouns and pronouns are a similar mess. 14 forms to a word, 6 patterns for masculinum, 4 for feminimum, 4 for neutrum with the word gender assigned ad hoc and loads of irregular words etc.

• Irregular plurals? Nouns have 14 forms in Czech, loads of them irregular plus there's a group of nouns that only have the plural forms even if you only use them for a single item. Some of them as in English (nůžky-scissors), some not (dveře-door).
• Ehm ... cattle is "dobytek" and guess what, it has no real singular either. Cow is kráva, bull is býk, ox is vůl, calf is tele and there is no Czech word to refer to a single individual Bos primigenius without committing to its sex or age.
• Let's see ... the sentence "I was there" .. in Czech it can be "Byl jsem tam.", "Tam jsem byl.", "Tam jsem byl já", "Já jsem tam byl.", "Já jsem byl tam." or even "Byl jsem tam já." with very slighly different meanings (you may be stressing the "I", the "was" or the "there" and you would use different orders as a response to different questions with the other orders being wrong. And the only reason people could give you would be "because they feel wrong".
• We've got words of Slavic origin, German origin, Latin and Greek.
• Idioms are nothing special. They exist in all languages. The difference between the English and Czech ones is that English often uses prepositions and Czech prefixes. Let's see "dělat" is "to do", dodělat = finish, oddělat = kill, remove, předělat = rework, obdělat = cultivate, zadělat = knead, cover, mess up, foul, podělat = botch up, fuck up, shit all over, přidělat - attach, faste, fix, make some more, nadělat = make a lot of sth (nadělat dluhy → run up debts
  (na)dělat si nepřátele → make enemies
  nadělat spoušť → wreak havoc, leave a scene of devastation
  nadělat kde paseku → play hell with sth , wreak havoc swh
  nadělat víc škody než užitku → do more harm than good, be more trouble than worth) ... (See here)

Compared to other cakes, English is not exceptionally complicated.

[tobyink]

Interesting. I know very little about the Czech language, except that the English words "pistol" and "robot" originally come from Czech. "Robota" literally meaning servitude.

Czech grammar seems remarkably similar to Latin. (They are of course, distantly related languages, but no more than say, Greek and Spanish.) In Latin there are five conjugations for verbs (though some people lump the fifth conjugation in with the third).

In Latin also, there are 14 forms for a noun; seven singular and seven plural. (Though the locative singular and plural might as well not exist: with very few exceptions it's the same as the ablative. So Latin is often taught as having six singular and six plural forms for nouns.)

And again in Latin, word order does not matter very much, only serving to add emphasis to particular parts of the sentence.

In English, word order can also be flexible. While we tend to think of subject-verb-object (SVO) being the standard, other word orders are often used.

• OVS: "Help," said the man.
• OSV: There you are!
• VSO tends to turn a statement into a question: Are you there?

I think your definition of idiom is different to mine. I'm referring to phrases like "this is a piece of cake" where the native English speaker will understand it to mean that "this task is very easy" whereas somebody learning English might actually assume the task involves cake.

Similarly, a native English speaker might describe an easy task as "like falling off a log", while a non-native might assume that it means the task is very painful.

[Anonymous Monk]

in czech and other slavic languages, information density is greater than in english

[LanX]

You're oversimplifying German grammar.

In antiquity strong verbs used to follow 7 regular schemes, now they diffused in over 180 subgroups, with many groups only consisting of only one verb.

So if you say those are mostly regular then English verbs are regular too, since they are the cognates of those strong verbs and in most cases you can apply the same "rules":

German:  Ich singe, ich sang, ich habe gesungen
English: I   sing,  I   sang, I   have sung

After trying to learn some languages I can tell you that non had a regular verb system. Just try to cope with Russian (or Slavic) aspects.

And in English you don't have to bother with many suffixes for different persons, 3rd person singular has an s, that's it.

Most English speakers don't even know what a subjunctive form is ("If I were you!"), while you have to learn and apply 4 subjunctive forms in Spanish.

OTOH you're right that English is very heterogeneous, mostly because Norman French was for centuries the language of the upper class, which resulted into an amalgamated creole language with a totally confusing orthography.

German profits from the fact that over centuries many scholars - and most prominently Martin Luther - tried to translate foreign (mainly Latin, Greek and French) constructs into corresponding German constructs to make them understandable for simple people, especially the language in the mass!

 Dia/rrhea   Greek  "flowing through"
 Durch/fall  German "falling through"
 
 grand-père  French "Big Father"
 Groß/vater  German "Big Father" 
 
 flood light English
 Flut/licht  German

So many German terms are more easily understandable by analyzing the parts.

And standardization of German - especially of orthography and pronunciation - happened for political and historical reasons very late in the 1880s and was always driven by compromising between the dialects in different autonomous regions to find a common base for a highly decentralized culture sphere.

Standard English OTOH was dictated by the slang of the cliques from Oxford and Cambridge and reflects a pronunciation as it was centuries ago in London's centralized realm. (with exception of the differing English of Scottish parliament)

So yes English has problems, but certainly not the verb system. =)

[fullermd]

• The verb "to dust" can mean to add dust to a surface, but also to remove dust from a surface.

Or, one of my personal favorites, the word "ravel", which (often) means the same thing as "unravel" 8-}

[Your Mother]

I know I'm very, very, very late but flammable and inflammable are my "favorite."